The Warner sun. (Warner, Brown Co., Dakota [S.D.]) 1885-1???, 1887-09-30
EAST INDIAN MYTHS.
Where erodOtu and Othor Ancient
Writers Found Their Fables. E8

tation, the tales that were told OF men
without noses, and with two oritices
above the mouth, for the purpose OF
breathing, which, it has been suggest
ed, may have been an unconscious
c~aricature of the MongOls, says a
writer referring to the fables of the old
Greek historians. The pigmies, only
three spans in height, who were
warred upon be cranes and by part
ridges as large as geese, may have
been a dwarfish race, dwelling in
woods and at the foot Of mountains
who earned a precarious livelihood as
bowmen and trappers.
Bhotan people, whose ears are
enormously elongated by artificial
means, may have been represented as
a tribe whose ears reached to the
ground, and which were otherwise so
hung that their owners would coil
themselves up and go to sleep in them.
The swift runners VIII could run down
a horse might haV1 found their ana
logues within quite a recent period
and may perhaps still find them in
some of the native states. The fable
of the gold-digging ant, as large as
wild foxes, has been long since ex-
planned as referring to Thibetan min
ers, men of low stature, who inhabit
the mountainous country to the north
of Kashmir.
The ANNA. mistaken for ants may
very well have been marmOts, which
are said to be plentiful in those parts.
AS for the monstrous shapes which no
traveller pre- ends to have seen with his
W eyes,, they existed, no doubt in
bright colOrs on the inner walls of
pagodas. and were intended to depict
the RAkshasas of demons, odious alike
to men and gods. Such was the proba-
bic origin Of the beings who were born
without mouths and lived on the
aroma of fruits and flowers; Of those
whose feet were burned the wrong
way, the heels being in front, while the
instep and toes were behind; of those
who bore The head of q dog and were
furnished with claws, who lived by
hunting and fowling. and who clothed
themselves with the skins of wild
beast; of those who had the ear of q
dog, erect hair and shaggy breasts and
with one eye in the center of the fore
head; finally of those without nOstrils,
who devoured a meat and all nan
ner of abomination and died in their
youth, ungainly creatures with the
upper lip hanging over the lower. Of
no greater importance are the marvel
Gus animals enormously delineated
rather than invented, such as
serpents with membranous wings.
that few by night; horseH with deers'
heads surmounted by a black horn,
with legs without a joint, and with the
tail of q pig; tigers twice the size of a
Ion; the ph9nix, sprung from the
SUMS rays. that lived its life of five
thousand years in India, and. singing
its own dirge, died in its own nest of
aromatic herbs hard by the fountains
of the Nile. 1t would be sheer waste
of time to bestow further thought upon
the childish inventions fathered by
Philostralus upon Appollonius of Ty-
ana, or rather upon the journal of his
fellow-traveler. Damis. @ lite as little
attention is due Latin writers who pro-
fessed to have derived their informa-
ton from Indian merchants settled at
Alexandria. or from apocryphal en-
ba.sies supposed TO have been dis
patcla5d by Indian Kings to Roman
Emperors. In more than one of these
romances allusion is made to the load
stone islands in the Indian Ocean.
which were believed to draw iron bolts
out Of ships at an Incredible distancs,
and which have been thus explained
by the fact that the seas in question
were navigated by vessels the planks
of which were bound together by ropes
and cord. without the use of nails and
bolts. -Asiatic Quarterly Reviea0.